Advice for a Winning Website

Your company’s website is a key aspect of your marketing efforts. 24% of people stated they found apps via a company’s website, and an additional 27% stated they used a search engine (which more than likely led them to a company website). Together that means that more than half of the people that find an app may start at its website!

Think of your website as the stage—and your app is the star. You want to create a stage that lets your star best show itself off!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You need to make sure your website will lead your potential customers to you and your app. It doesn’t matter how amazing the stage and star are if people never find the theatre! That’s why SEO is absolutely essential. Make sure you’ve got the right keywords that will guarantee your website shows up in the results when potential customers are searching for the features and functions your app delivers.

For example—if you have an exercise app, you don’t want your app showing up if someone does a search for flowers or kitchen gadgets, but you definitely want it show up if someone searches for fitness or health!

Home Page

The minute someone lands on your home page, the curtain is up and the show is on! We recommend keeping the visual elements clean and simple so the visitor’s eye doesn’t get confused, and choosing a color palette that is complementary. It’s also a good idea to include your app’s icon.

There are three things we recommend you place on your home page:

Marketing Pitch

Your marketing pitch should be crafted to convince someone to buy your app in 1-3 short sentences. This is not the place for long explanations or a full list of features (that’s what the Product page is for). Focus on your app’s most important and unique selling points. The one question to keep in mind when writing your pitch is: what is the one thing that will get people interested enough to download or learn more about your app?

Bonus Tip: If you’ve gotten favorable reviews and/or testimonials, you can also include one or two highlight quotes with a link to the full review. If you choose to do this, it should be from high-profile reviews, and you need to keep the quote very short. Don’t clutter your home page with dozens of quotes and walls of text.

Demo Video

We’ve talked before about the importance of giving your app’s demo video a prominent place on your website. After all, a demo video is only useful if potential customers are able to find and watch it! Use your pitch as a teaser, making the visitor want to watch the video.

Call to Action

Otherwise known as your “Buy Now!” buttons. Use encouraging, catchy language, and make the actual button large so that it’s highly visible and easy to use. Remember, some people will visit your website on their phones or tablets, and having a small button can result in frustration when people are using their fingers to navigate and click.

If your app is available on multiple marketplaces, you’ll want a button for each. Just make sure they are easy to tell apart; you don’t want to send an Android user to the Apple store!

Bonus Tip: if your company develops multiple apps, you can rotate through the apps on your home page, choosing which one to showcase based on whatever your current marketing push happens to be.

Other Important Webpages

After the home page, here are some other pages that your website needs in order to be able to successfully market your app.

Product Page

This is the place to go into detail about your app. Screenshots are great on the product page, both as a way to show off specific features and functionality, but also as a way to break up the textual information. If you have additional marketing or demo videos, this is the place to put them.

Bonus Tip: This is where your users are going to come first if they have a question about how to use your app. So be sure you have subsections or sub-pages for a FAQ and for your app tutorials.

Company Page

Customers today want to know about the people behind the products they buy. Include a short history of the company and brief bios of your team.

News/Media Page

This is where your press kit will live, along with the full list of your app’s favorable reviews. Highlight quotes from each review along with a link to the full review. Never just include a link—most people will never click it. Also, never post the full text of a long review—walls of text are boring.

The one caveat to this advice is if you have a great many reviews: in this case, only highlight the best of the best, and then you can include a link to the rest.

Social Media and Contact Info

You’ve got to make it easy for people to reach you.

Depending on your site design, you might be able to do this as part of your company page. In general, however, a separate contact page is a good idea. As is obvious, this is where you list all of the methods by which you can be contacted: address, phone, Email. Including icons for your company social media accounts is also a good idea (even if your website design has those icons appearing on every page)

Bonus Tip: Integrated contact forms are a terrific way to make it even easier for someone to get in touch with you – but only if you’re checking the Email you have them sent to frequently. Nothing is more frustrating to a potential customer or a current user than to use a contact form and then never get a response back. Better to not have the contact form at all, in that case!

To Blog or Not to Blog?

Should you have a blog? That depends.

Blogging can be a great way to engage with your users and potential customers, and done properly, can improve your website SEO and help demonstrate that your website is current.

And therein lies the rub. Blogging takes planning and time—and if you don’t keep up with it, not only will it not help your website, it could make it look as though your site is old and out of date.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself before you start a blog:

What are we going to write about?

Do we have enough topics to write about to make our company blog interesting? (A blog that repeats the same few topics over and over is not interesting and will not attract return readers.)

Who is going to be doing the writing? Are we committed to the time it will take to write a blog post on a regular basis (whether that’s weekly or monthly)? If not, does the company have the budget to hire writers?

The absolute worst thing you can do is start a blog and then let it go stale and sit there on your website. If you’re on the fence or at all unsure about whether you should have a blog, we’d recommend against it. You can always start a blog later when you have the time and/or resources to support one.

And there you have it: follow the above advice and tips, and you’ll have a winning website ready to shine the spotlight on your app!

Need help with a video for your website? Get in touch today to talk about working with us.